


No Glossy Surface

by scioscribe



Category: A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Bittersweet, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 20:08:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13061262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “You’ve done something for him,” Harold says, like JB has given Jude a kidney.  He would, but he’s pretty sure his own are junked.





	No Glossy Surface

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atheilen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atheilen/gifts).



> Best wishes for a happy Yuletide.
> 
> [This](https://apollo.imgix.net/content/uploads/2014/09/Jasper-Johns4.png?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=640&h=447) is the painting that JB is completely ignoring the history of.

For three months after the accident, everything JB touches turns to shit.

It’s all regression, and he doesn’t need a psychiatrist—though he has one and frequently threatens to find another, as if the prospect of competition will inspire this year’s model to appreciate the luck of having him as a client—to tell him why.  He paints photographs, after all.  He knows that his days of stylistic dabbling belong to the days of “The Kwotidien,” to fidgeting with bags of hair under the vanilla wood of his reception desk, to Malcolm and Willem being alive.  His youth now comes with a buttery Polaroid filter, all of it shot through with warm light.  They just don’t make them like they used to.

So he takes a fine-tipped marker and covers eggs, ordinary one-dozen-pack eggs, with intensely detailed collages of his friends and family.  Here is Jude dangling from the fire escape that is the crown of its egg.  Here is Willem in the horribly-patterned sweater he wore in _Duets_.  Here is Malcolm constructing a paper house that wraps all around the curve of the egg, a seemingly endless succession of minarets and stained glass windows.  Then JB drills the tiniest of holes in them and sucks out all the slippery, slimy yolk and white; he fills them instead with individual threads of silk from one of Jude’s ties, with golden and gray hair he steals off Willem’s brush, with micro-printed schematics of Malcolm’s plans for the Lantern House.  All of that plus colored sand.  And then, out of some mad desire for precision, he actually constructs a dropping device that plonks each egg down into an immense fishbowl, where it will either break—spilling its precious contents and shattering its carefully-constructed images—or not.  In the end he has ten broken eggs, two whole ones (the one with his father and the one with Malcolm, go fucking figure), and a shit-ton of teal and ochre and carmine sand with little non-treasures buried in it.

He leans forward and puts his forehead against his worktable.  This is not, he thinks, art.  Maybe it could have been in someone else’s hands, but this was never his style, and for him, from him, it all looks about as meaningful as a fourth grader’s baking soda volcano.

They deserve better than this, he knows, his throat feeling swollen and sore like he’s just had his tonsils out.  If Jude ever finds out he lifted anything of Willem’s for something this fucking stupid, he will hire a contract killer.  JB will never see it coming.

This is all, more or less, what he’s thinking of when he tries to kiss Jude and Jude freaks out on him, hissing like a startled cat.  That he is great at everything but loving the people he loves.

* * *

JB knows he is older now because he doesn’t view that kiss—and the way Jude will not, cannot forgive him for it—as the end of their friendship; when the time comes, he goes right back into the thankless slog of trying to keep Jude alive.  He can sit there and watch Jude drink the Andy-ordered peanut butter banana smoothies without Jude liking him, without Jude loving him.  He loves Jude.  So there, he thinks petulantly.

Jude slowly gains weight and solidity, a sense of being actually in the world.  He keeps four-fifths of his psychiatric appointments.

JB is in the Jude St. Francis conspiracy, he is like a Knight fucking Templar, and if he puts it that way, he feels less like he and Harold and Julia and Richard and the Henry Youngs and Sanjay and, well, Everyone Jude’s Ever Known Everyone He’s Ever Loved Everyone He’s Ever Hated Everyone He’s Ever Fucked are all collectively Jude’s frazzled, doting parents, obsessed over bowel movements and what he’s eating and how he’s sleeping.  Conspiracies are at least cool.  But it bums him out, even when he puts it that way, because they used to not _do_ this, this obsessive analysis of Jude behind his back.  Jude has always been a Rorschach test, but once upon a time, they all had the peace of mind of not thinking the wrong interpretation would fill his bathtub with blood or cave his cheeks in until he looks like a corpse.

Jude would hate these conversations, if he knew about them.  Jude always hated being looked at.

The three worst things JB ever did to him involved looking—he pinned young, beautiful, skittish, androgynous Jude up on a gallery wall for people to stare at him; he looked at him and imagined he could kiss away his grief; he did fucking Jackson’s goddamn impression and made Jude think that was how people saw him.  In fits of Sophoclean grandeur, JB thinks that if Jude really wants him to, he will put his own eyes out for him.

He is impressed enough by the selflessness of this to tell Jude about it, at least after the conspiracy has started letting its guard down, when he’s sure Jude won’t take him up on it.

Jude, who has still not forgiven him but has also not stopped having Saturday dinners with him—even though the threat of involuntary committal is no longer guillotine-sharp against his neck—looks at him for a long few seconds with those snake-green eyes and then, very slightly, the corners of his mouth flit up.

“Always the center of attention, JB.”

He feels like Jude isn’t appreciating the totality of the eye-gouging impulse, but he will shrug off everything if he can get Jude to smile.  “You know how unnatural it’s been for me to let you hog the spotlight?  Maybe _I_ wanted to be the only one people had interventions for.”

“Willem had an offer once on _Oedipus_.”  Jude says Willem’s name carefully, like it’s a peach he’s holding between his teeth and he’s trying not to bruise the skin.

JB’s eyes feel hot.  He misses Willem too—Willem and Malcolm and even Sophie—but Jude owns Willem’s memory in such a way that JB always feels like he’s trespassing on it.  So he tries to keep his voice clear and level.  “To play Oedipus?”

Jude nods.  “After _The Odyssey_.”

“No wonder that never happened.  Two successful epic action blockbusters and some asshole goes looking to adapt the original motherfucker himself?  That’s a big leap.”

“The screenwriter left in the incest,” Jude says, “but he took out Oedipus blinding himself.”

“I’m offended on behalf of art.”

“He said the blinding was metaphorical, a sop to the censors, and _really_ Oedipus had castrated himself.”

“Yeah,” JB says, laughing, “because the ancient Greeks were really into the Hays Code, is that what he was thinking?  Who’s gonna save us from Hollywood classicists?  You know what, Willem should have done it.  Him being attached might have pushed it through.  I would watch that shit every Friday night for the rest of my life, it’d be my favorite movie of all time.  And you know what they would have called it?”

He doesn’t know how long he can keep this afloat, but he hasn’t seen Jude this alive in a long time.

“ _Oedipus Rex_ , I’m guessing,” Jude says.  “Or _Oedipus the King_ , because—”

“Something-something ‘American audiences,’ yeah.  Only they wouldn’t have, because half Willem’s movies got saddled with these bullshit titles, like The Improbable Adjective Noun.  They would have called it something like _The Perspicacious King._ ”

“ _The Theban Crossroads Killer_.”

“That just sounds like _Unsolved Mysteries_ ,” JB says.  “ _The Patrilineal Curse.”_

Jude’s smile is real now, even if he’s covering his mouth with his hand like he used to all those years ago.  He says, “ _The Metaphorical Castration_.”

JB says, abruptly, “What would you do if I kissed you again?”

“JB.”  It sounds like a warning.

“I’m not doing it, Jude,” JB says with as much patience as he has.  “I’m just asking.”

Jude has always been the most beautiful person JB knows.  Willem was the handsome one, the one whose looks were made for billboards and silver screens, but Jude is the one best-suited for canvas.  He exists in warm, carefully-blended acrylics and soft charcoal lines.  JB has, after thirty years of friendship, finally seen Jude’s scars—there was a time, when he was starving himself down to bird-light bones, when Jude cared about nothing, not even his secrets—and those too, as awful as it sounds, have their own aesthetic beauty, their own bas-relief texture, their cross-hatch patterns, their shifts in color and tone.

JB kissed Willem and he hooked up once, twice, three times with Malcolm, but Jude—

“Willem was the last person I kissed,” Jude says.  “And then you kissed me.  So it isn’t true anymore.”

The weight of that condemnation is apocalyptic, Boschian, meant to crush him.  It doesn’t.  He is really fucking tired, but he is the asshole who drops the eggs, not someone who gets dropped himself.  JB’s only real wounds have always been self-inflicted.  And, at least for right now, he just doesn’t care.  Fuck it.

“Then it wouldn’t matter if you did it again,” JB says.

Jude pushes himself back from the table.  His legs are still slightly too loose, still waiting on another few pounds before they will fit right again, and so for now he’s back in the chair.  Despite this, JB thinks again of his dipshit imitation of Jude’s walk, all drag and list— _I’m Jude St. Francis_ —and wonders if he’s just being an asshole.

But Jude doesn’t leave, even though Jude is always leaving.  Jude just says, evenly, “It would matter because I don’t want to.”

“I’ve got it,” JB says, without a pause.  “It’s _The Unseen Blinding_.”

* * *

The only thing worth salvaging from the egg project is the slightly pebbly texture of the shells, which subtly shaped what could be painted on them, subtly redirected his brushstrokes in a hundred minute ways.  For his next show, he ditches canvas and paints on wood, stone, tightly stretched cloth.  He likes the way the surfaces themselves fuck with him.

Jude likes this series, and JB knows it not because Jude tells him so but because Jude develops this habit of hanging around JB’s studio watching him work.  He’s cut back his hours at the firm—for Jude, for _lawyers_ , this means he’s still working fifty hours a week—and so he ostensibly has the time.  JB has never worked with an audience before.  No boyfriend or assistant has ever watched him with this level of attention.

Luckily, JB is both enough of a performer not to mind and enough of an artist not to notice once the work is going well.

“It’s like Jasper Johns,” Jude says one day.  He’s waited until JB has moved on to cleaning his brushes.

JB takes a critical look at what he’s been doing.  “Not in content.”

“Stylistically, though.”

JB’s favorite Johns painting, the 2013 _Regrets_ , is more notable for its colors than its texture, though, which is why the comparison still feels wrong to him.  _Regrets_ looks like a distressed wall, slate-blue and gray, in some crumbling house, some Lispenard Street apartment, but with bright, primary colored stained glass is breaking through the middle of it.  It has a story behind it that JB knows—a photograph, some typical Jasper Johns overkill in expression until satisfied, overkill that somehow works—but what it always makes him think of has nothing to do with its origins.  It’s just that band of color that somehow still exists despite everything around it.  He does not tell people this because it’s disgustingly sentimental and his own work is already disgustingly sentimental enough without drawing attention to it.

(Though even without him drawing attention to it, critics notice it anyway.  JB’s work is beloved, but it’s not beloved enough to prevent snide little asides about a man who has made his career on enraptured, gauzy looks at his friends.)

The Johns comparison also feels wrong to him because JB never feels like anyone else.  The one word he most wants to be used in commentary on his work is “iconic,” and if he goes to his grave without anyone having said this, he will throw a fucking fit.

“When is somebody going to look at something and say it’s like _me_?” he says, without going through the thought process that took him there.

It’s fine.  Jude knows him too well to even react to the whine.  “I’m sure they already do.  Actually, I know they do.  I look you up sometimes in JSTOR.”

JB can’t wrap his head around a universe where Jude sits around running his name through academic journal search engines, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to hear about it, so he asks, and Jude’s voice runs over him like cool water as he paints.  It’s another kind of texture.  He’s the surface and Jude is the paint.  After this many years of friendship, he should have some idea of what picture they’re making, but he doesn’t.  Increasingly, he doesn’t.

* * *

Jude kisses JB for the first time two years after they have that talk about Jasper Johns, the talk that JB always remembers as being about _Regrets_ , even though neither of them ever mentioned it.

They’re having drinks at a café in Lyon, on the first tentative vacation Jude has taken since Willem.  (Harold kissed JB on the cheek the last time they all had dinner together—not in front of Jude but afterwards, in the kitchen, when JB was refusing to let the cobbler get put away without him taking one last bite and Harold was doing the dishes, his hands soapy, his eyes wet.  “You’ve done something for him,” Harold says, like JB has given Jude a kidney.  He would, but he’s pretty sure his own are junked.)

They’re having drinks and the table is narrow and spindly and JB leans forward to get the maraschino cherries out of Jude’s amaretto sour and Jude kisses him.

His mouth is cold from the ice in the drink.  It’s not like JB has gone years between kisses just because he’s gone years between kisses with Jude—hell, JB had somebody who amounted to an art world groupie in his bed the week before last—but for a second it feels that way.  Like he’s clumsy.  He is always the observer with Jude, never the participant.

They go back to the hotel room and Jude takes his clothes off with a kind of dead-behind-the-eyes look that would turn JB off if he were susceptible at all, in this moment, to being turned off.  He’s not.  He can think of a thousand reasons Jude would not want to do this, and he understands them, but hey, who is he to question Jude’s decision to go for it anyway?  He didn’t sign up to be the king of good choices.

 _Fuck Harold_ , he thinks guiltily.  _How often does a chance like this come around?  
_

Jude doesn’t kiss him again.  He doesn’t do anything but get into bed and roll over.  Which is fine, of course, and he’s not one to quarrel with the view, but, in a fit of gloomy pessimism, he didn’t bring any fucking condoms with him, and barebacking it isn’t an option.

He has given this little spiel a lot over the years, and has honed it down to the minimum level of awkwardness, but usually he’s with people who are less _fraught_ , so he’s extra-careful now.  “Not to put a damper on things, but we’re probably gonna have to be a little more careful, because I didn’t get out of the Jackson days unscathed, you know?”  Herpes, warts, hep B.

Jude says, “I have those already,” and his tone is strange, not quite lifeless but more like the concussed kind of stunned, like JB has surprised him but like he can’t really care.

“Oh,” JB says.  “Shit.  Okay.”  He recalibrates.  “Then it’s no worries, right?”

“No worries,” Jude echoes.

The sex is awkward, more like an unusual, strained calisthenics routine than anything else.  There’s sweat and grappling and the strange intimacy you have with someone when you’re fucking but you’re not passionate enough to lose track of the clumsy, amateur porn physicality of it all.  JB is conscious of discomfort and stiff knees; conscious of the dawning certainty that it is not going to get any better than this, that this is what fucking Jude is and what it is is not great, is not even good.

He thinks of Willem saying the sex was amazing and something prickles up inside him, grief like an unruly porcupine, and he pulls out, cursing at himself.

Jude turns onto his back, and for the first time since the café, he looks alive, interested.  Maybe even a little scared, though JB has no idea of what, or why.  “What’s wrong?”

“What,” JB says, in the mood all of a sudden to be an asshole, “aside from the necrophilia?”

Jude flushes and JB itches to take his picture, itches to paint it: Jude with his thighs still slightly open, with JB’s handprints on his hips, with a smeary bit of lubricant visible even now, Jude’s light brown skin against the white sheets, Jude on his elbows, Jude’s eyes wide.  He’s so fucking beautiful that JB hates him for the same reason he sometimes hated Willem.  No wonder they fucked each other, no wonder Willem went for him like a shot even though Willem was straight, or mostly straight.  But it pisses JB off that they had good sex and that he and Jude are now having the world’s _shittiest_ sex.

It pisses him off even more that Willem is dead, that Malcolm is dead.  _The Unseen Blinding._ Sometimes he misses them both so much that he briefly convinces himself they’re not gone.  He’ll start to call one of them to tell them something.

Who’s he going to tell about _this_?  Fucking _Richard?  Harold?_

There is nobody left in his life who loves him more than Jude—nobody, at least, who isn’t his family, and JB doesn’t count them at all because they're required to love him, right?  Malcolm was the last person who picked him first.  He could have told Malcolm about this.

“I didn’t _ask_ to fuck you, you know,” JB says.  “I didn’t say, oh, hey, Jude, let’s go to France and by the way, _voulez-vous coucher_ —”

Jude leaves him there.  Not just in bed, not just in the hotel room, but in Lyon.  He checks out and goes.

JB is almost impressed with himself.  Not many people, he thinks, manage to fuck up their life and relationships when they’re past fifty.  If this is a midlife crisis, he’s going to live a long fucking life.  Good for him.  He drinks himself to sleep; wakes up at three in the morning and miserably jerks off to the thought of Jude and Willem.  Coming while crying is not a good look for him and it kills whatever vicious pride he had going.

* * *

But he meets up with Jude again in Nice, in the bar of the hotel where they had already reserved their rooms, all those months back when they first planned the trip.

“We’ve both been to France,” Jude said back then.

“No,” JB said, “ _I’ve_ been to France, _you’ve_ been everywhere, so let me pick.  Not all of us can afford to spin a globe and go to our dream destinations all the time.”  Rich for an artist is not remotely rich for a lawyer or a movie star or an architect: he used to like to remind his friends of this all the time.

Jude is not drinking an amaretto sour.  There’s no reason for JB to think about how his mouth would taste, but he does anyway.

“Hey, Jude,” JB says, and then he realizes it took him thirty years to make that joke.  Well, he never was much of a Beatles fan; that was Malcolm, who divided them up a long time ago.  Jude was George, JB was Ringo, Willem was Paul, and Malcolm was George Epstein.  (“We don’t have a John,” Malcolm explained.)

_Hey, Jude, don't make it bad.  Take a sad song and make it better._

Jude smiles.  “Hey, Ringo.”

JB says, awkwardly, “I’m glad you came back,” which doesn’t even make since because they’re in a different city, but: _came back to me_.  That’s what he meant.

In the little pocket of quiet that follows that, Jude says, “It wasn’t you.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t because of you.  That I wasn’t—that I didn’t—I just don’t like having sex.  With anyone.”

Sure, JB thinks, he bets Jude _hated_ going to bed with his hot movie star boyfriend, but then something about Jude’s averted eyes makes him think that, despite the immense unlikeliness of this, it might actually be true.  Of course Willem would lie to cover Jude.  Willem would have spent his whole life as Jude’s umbrella if he could have.  JB has never loved anybody like that, has never been loved like that.

So he just shrugs.

“Okay?” Jude says.

 _Then why did you take all your clothes off?_ That’s what he wants to ask, but there’s no way to say it.  He thinks he knows, anyway.  Willem was the last person Jude kissed, and JB ruined that; Willem was the last person Jude had terrible, uncomfortable sex with, and now JB has cured that.  He’s like the Swiss Army knife of dealing with a dead partner.  That’s what Harold should have told him, though some squeamish part of him hopes that Harold doesn’t know, hopes that Harold thinks he’s more useful than that.

He expects everything to go back to normal.  He holds his bitterness close to his heart all through their dinner, all through their long, faux-desultory conversation afterwards.  Jude has gotten what he wanted, so now they will continue the rest of this trip without any more talking about it.  What happens in Lyon stays in Lyon.

But that night, when JB is almost asleep, Jude lets himself in through the connecting door between their rooms, gets into bed with him, takes off his prostheses and settles them on the floor.  He doesn’t kiss JB, he just lies against his back and, with tremendous carefulness, puts his arm across JB’s stomach, which JB tries not to reflexively suck in.

He says, “Let me guess, you hate sharing beds with people too.”  His voice red wine dry.

“No,” Jude says softly.  “I like it.”  His hand is warm: three fingers and a thumb against JB’s pajama shirt and his pinky finger against the bare skin where the shirt has pulled up.  It is, JB thinks, a textural shift.

He imagines holding the moment in one cupped hand.  It is rough rather than smooth.  It might break if he dropped it.  They are not strong, they are as weak as anything that has lasted this long can possibly be, they are a decaying building shot through with color.  There is a story here—not just in Jude but in him and even in the two of them together—but this is the painting, this is the part where someone could come across them and, without knowing a thing, see something of the interruption of the tragedy, sense some violent and painful kind of peace.


End file.
